When Satan Was Spotted at Head Start

Ross Cheit’s new book
The Witch-Hunt Narrative is a revisionist take on the
Satanic panic of the 1980s and ’90s, attempting to make the case
that “there was not, by any reasonable measure, an epidemic of
‘witch hunts’ in the 1980s.” The National Center for Reason and
Justice, which advocates for people it believes have been falsely
accused or wrongly convicted of crimes against children, has posted
a long
rebuttal to Cheit’s text. Here’s a sample:

Cheit marshals extensive minutiae to “prove” that
Nancy Smith, a middle-aged, white Head Start bus driver in the
1980s, was guilty as convicted: that she joined with a black ex-con
Joseph Allen to take the children from Head Start and ritually
molest them at Smith’s and Allen’s homes. But he deletes the
exculpatory evidence contained in a
clemency petition for Smith, filed in 2012 by the Ohio
Innocence Project. Cheit glancingly refers to the petition, but not
to its meticulously documented contents.

For instance, he goes on at length about the accusing children’s
knowledge of a pink dress Joseph Allen allegedly wore while
molesting them. He does not say that the children were told about
items in Allen’s home before they were questioned—so it’s no
surprise they could describe the dress to the police. He does not
mention that in the Allen lineup, only one of four of the alleged
victims picked Allen. The rest picked other men. Parents can be

seen on video whispering into their child’s ear while the child
was picking from the lineup. One even moved their child’s arm
toward Allen. Cheit omits the letter from initial lead investigator
Tom Cantu to the Ohio Innocence Project (Jan. 25, 2007) stating
that he had interviewed the children involved in the complaints and
that they all denied that Nancy Smith had done anything to them.
Cantu, now a sheriff’s deputy in Las Vegas,
said he never believed charges were warranted and told his
superiors as much.

And Cheit neglects the most glaring piece of evidence of
Smith’s and Allen’s innocence: Head Start attendance records,
attached in an appendix to the
clemency petition, show the children were at preschool on the
days and times they were supposedly at Smith’s and Allen’s homes
being molested.

There is much more, which you can read
here.